#96 - Mathilde Collin

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
Hey, how's it going? This is Craig Cannon, and you're listening to Y Combinator's podcast.
Today's episode is with Mathilde Collin. Mathilde is the co-founder and CEO of Front.
Front is a shared inbox for teams, and they were part of the YC Summer 2014 batch. You can check out Front at frontapp.com, and Mathilde is on Twitter at CollinMathilde. All right, here we go. I think the most pressing and important question is this first one from Tuomas Grannas about LEGO. He asked, what's your favorite LEGO theme?

**SPEAKER_2** (0:33)
Yeah, so my favorite LEGO theme is something that not a lot of people know. It's called Ideas.
And so basically, you can submit. If you have an idea of a new LEGO set that should be built, then people can vote. And then if it gets enough votes, then they build it. And so one of the sets that I just got is three birds. It seems boring, but they're actually super beautiful.
And they came from a random person submitting this idea.

**SPEAKER_1** (1:00)
That's so cool. I was just reading an AMA the other day with a LEGO master builder. Did you see that one on Reddit?
You probably knew all that stuff. What kind of birds are they?

**SPEAKER_2** (1:11)
So that will be really hard for me to not tell you in French. Yeah, that's next level in my learning of English.

**SPEAKER_1** (1:20)
So I know what Frontend is just because I've been around YC, but for the average person who doesn't know what it is, how would you describe it?

**SPEAKER_2** (1:28)
So I would describe it as a shared inbox. So you can think about it as what Gmail or Outlook does, but we've added collaboration features and workflows so that it works better for teams. So we have a few different kinds of teams that are using the product from recruiting teams, support teams, account management teams, client services teams, operations teams. And what they have in common is they have a lot of emails coming in and inside their company, a lot of people inside the team that needs to handle these emails and they struggle managing that as a team because email wasn't made for teams.
That's what we do.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:05)
And when did you add the personal email to it?

**SPEAKER_2** (2:08)
Actually pretty early on. The thing is, it wasn't working that well, so...

**SPEAKER_1** (2:14)
Meaning you weren't getting users?

**SPEAKER_2** (2:16)
Yeah, meaning in order to have a product that people will use for their individual emails, you need to get to a level of feature parity with Gmail or Outlook that's pretty intense. And so even if you could do it four years ago, it's only about two years ago that we started having the features that would allow people to manage both shared inboxes and individual inboxes as well. So today we have, I think, 40% of our daily active users who are using Front both for shared inboxes and individual inboxes.
And we're releasing a brand new version of Front at the end of October that we've been working on for nine months, and the goal is to make sure that people can enjoy the individual inbox as much as they enjoy the shared inbox.

**SPEAKER_1** (3:04)
Can you be more specific?

**SPEAKER_2** (3:06)
Meaning, so today when you have a shared inbox, let's say support ads, sales ads, it's obvious that they require collaboration. Otherwise, you would not have a shared inbox. But for individual inbox, so matilde.frontend.com, they also require collaboration. So I will collaborate with my assistant, with our sales team on specific deals, with our recruiting team on specific candidates, with our product team on product feedback.
And if, so tomorrow with Front, you can also add your individual inbox, like matilde.frontend app, and then assign messages, have internal conversations around these messages, integrate it with whatever tool you're using, so GitHub, Salesforce, Trello, Asana, et cetera. So it becomes a full replacement for Gmail Outlook.

**SPEAKER_1** (3:48)
Gotcha. Okay, how do you feel about a Gmail, or rather Google wrapping up inbox?

**SPEAKER_2** (3:54)
I think it's zero surprising.
So, I mean, so first of all, I wasn't a huge fan of inbox. I think inbox brought a few things that were great, like they grouped notifications, they had great snooze features. But I think that if you want people to change how they deal with email, the amount of innovation that you need to bring needs to be super high, because it's very disruptive to change. So then the value proposition needs to be like, it needs to be 10x better. And I didn't feel like inbox was 10x better than Gmail.